Each episode of "16 and Pregnant" follows a different teenager through her pregnancy, childbirth and first weeks of motherhood. "Teen Mom" follows the young mothers through their early months and years of parenthood.

By documenting the consequences of unprotected sex and the challenges of being a young parent, the show played a role in reducing the rate of teenage births, according to the researchers Melissa Kearney of the Hamilton Project and Phillip Levine of Wellesley College. They say the programs reduced the teenage birthrate by almost 6 percent. Their research also found that social media posts and online searches related to contraception increased when the show was on.

Teen pregnancy fell faster in areas where teenagers were watching more MTV programming, they said. Kearney and Levine used birth records and Nielsen television ratings for their research and focused on the period after 2009, when "16 and Pregnant" debuted on MTV.